BAFTA Honors Saturday Night Live and Lorne Michaels With an Intimate Dinner at Dumbo House

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts got a little international on Thursday night, honoring a New York institution (and its Canadian creator) with an intimate dinner at Dumbo House in Brooklyn. The occasion was a special award for Saturday Night Live and its creator, Lorne Michaels, for the influence the show has had on comedy all over the world, and SNL stars past and present (and a good many former presenters) turned up to celebrate: Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, and Kenan Thompson were on hand along with the rest of the 2018 cast, as were Paul Rudd, Fred Armisen, Jon Hamm, and Simon Pegg. Sir Patrick Stewart hailed Michaels from the stage, where he treated his toast as something of an audition to return to the show as a host. “I feel sorry for all those people who are asked to come back again and again,” Stewart said in his remarks, “I must have done it perfectly the first time, because I haven’t been asked to come back.” In the episode he hosted, in 1994 (“musical guest Salt and Pepa!” he crowed, “sorry, I just love saying that”), one sketch had him playing an “erotic baker,” Stewart explained, to the room’s delight. “But has anybody checked in on what that naughty baker might be doing now?”

BAFTA has a mentorship and career development program for promising young British artists in film, games, and television called Breakthrough Brits; two recent honorees with even more recent critical TV hits—Lydia Hampson, who produced the series Fleabag, was honored in 2017, and Charlie Covell, who wrote the series The End of theF *** ingWorld, was chosen in 2015—also spoke briefly, thanking Michaels for creating a series whose influence made their work possible. Covell even had SNL alum Amy Poehler as a mentor, she said, and it was after a meeting with her in Los Angeles that she sat down to write her show.

Onstage to accept his award (“much heavier than I thought”), Michaels nodded to the collaborative nature of SNL, which has been on the air for four decades, and which continues to tussle with the topics of the week. (In recent years, they certainly haven’tlackedformaterial.) “Thank you so much for this,” Michaels said. “I’m accepting this award on the behalf of many of the people here. I’m really honored with this.”

The event was sponsored by Cadillac, which provided an air of poignancy to the proceedings: The iconic American automotive company recently announced that it would be withdrawing its corporate presence from lower Manhattan (a not insignificant loss for the various art and fashion events it has hosted there over the past four years), and has said that it will re-situate it in its birthplace of Detroit. But as Michaels—or his show, or the skyline, glittering outside Dumbo House’s sprawling terrace—could attest: At the end of the day, there’s no place like New York.